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Saturday, June 6, 2015

Communicating Enterprise Architecture

A main success factor for
us is that we realized that business needs a vision not technical
design. All parts of your organization needs to participate in the enterprise transformation. Only a small fraction has technical insight, the majority have other concerns. Therefore we have a “city” regulation plan for our
systems landscape. Just like city planning. Politicians look at
concepts and overall quality of a regulation, with blocks, roads, and
parks (e.g.). They do not bother with the technical building
drawings. This is where we think many EA projects fail; they tend to
focus on the technical drawings, not the quality of life for the
organization (eg. Population for a city).

The IT-regulation plan is a
“City plan” and is a contemporary view of all major functional
areas (systems) and their main functions. It has a color legend so
that is proves to be a good transition architecture illustration. It
is maintained 2 times a year to reflect ongoing projects and decisions
from the portfolio board. Further more we have a roadmap for all
existing systems (silos) and a modernization scenario which is the
overall plan for major effort during the next 10 years. These are all
used when describing the mandate of new projects, where the work
effort is illustrated on the target architecture and the regulation
plan.

The regulation plan has
proven to be very good for communication our business for all parts
of the organization. Even the Finance Minister has a A0 copy in her
office. The power of is comes to life when business processes are
explained as a “tour of the city”. People like stories and
understand the effects on the city; where maintenance must be
conducted or new building has to be erected. It really brings
business and IT to the same table.

So take a look at our "City Plan". Although in Norwegian you get the idea of how a visualization of structure can form the basis of something to communicate upon. The illustration is quite large so it is presented at Prezi.com.